Chapter 30
We have sex once more,after I’m done crying.
Because it hurts, loving Tristan.
And I’ve always craved things that hurt.
* * *
Tristan takes a nap that afternoon,which is unlike him, but I suspect that fucking the wife of the man he loves is also unlike him. I won’t argue with any coping strategy he needs, and anyway, he looks so achingly sweet stretched out on his stomach, his lips parted, heavy limbs tangled in the sheets.
I go up to the rooftop terrace and watch the sun sink into the west, wishing I could make my hands stop shaking. I didn’t want this—I mean, I did, but I wasn’t going to act on the wanting. Not only because this marriage is important and I need to make it work but because I’ve committed to making it work. Because I love Mark, and I’ve reiterated my promise to be faithful over and over, and I meant it.
Because the last three weeks of being called into his office to suck him off, of skipping dinner to play chess and then ride his lap, of waking up in the dark with his hot mouth between my legs have been paradise. My cunt is always sore, I’m speckled with bruises and bites, and I’ve never lost so many chess games in a row in my life. I’ve never been happier.
But it’s hard here, so far away from my husband, alone with Tristan and his sad eyes and his soft, surprised smiles. His goodness burning like a high, clear star, fixed and strong enough to reach across any abyss of darkness.
I look down at my still-shaking hands.
I have to kill someone this week.
I don’t want to do it. I know that makes me a coward—insufficiently devout maybe because, above all, saints are supposed to be devout. But it’s been months since I’ve killed someone, since before the yacht, and the time away from it has felt like a relief. I don’t lose sleep over the people I’ve killed, not truly, because all of them were gross, horrible, or callow—but having killed, being a killer…
Yes. That I lose sleep over.
Filip Drobny, though, I might take some satisfaction in killing.
* * *
My uncle needsDrobny dead because he is almost single-handedly responsible for arming the Carpathian rebels and destabilizing the presence of the Church in Carpathia. I’d like him dead because he tried to kill Mark.
I remind myself that these are all good and important things as I lie to Tristan and tell him that I want to see the city at night, that I think what we need is to get out of the penthouse. It’s the last thing I want to do, and I can tell it’s the last thing he wants to do. We’d both rather stay here and have guilty but inevitable sex.
But my best chance of killing Drobny is at his brother’s nightclub, according to the contact I met in the café the other day, and even though I’ve acquainted myself with the outside of the building during walks and runs through the city, I still haven’t seen the inside.
Which is why, once the sun has properly set and night has truly come, Tristan and I are in a nightclub, Tristan scowling at everyone who happens to look at me longer than he’d like.
“You’re scaring people,” I say, taking a sip of my drink. “It’s not very subtle.”
“They’re not very subtle,” he grumbles, trying to shield my body from view of the crowd. Not that it matters—no one is looking as much as he thinks they are. Yes, my dress is short and tight, but it’s hardly the shortest or tightest dress here, and there is eye candy everywhere. It’s the kind of club where pretty people come to display themselves, and I discreetly watch over Tristan’s shoulder as two eyelinered men in their twenties are approached by someone in a black suit and then shown to a staircase up to the second floor. Among the flashing LED lights and flickering shadows, I catch glimpses of balconies higher up. VIP booths. Maybe separate rooms.
That’s where Drobny would be.
Lox had been right when she’d assumed there were safe houses within a short trip of the Adriatic—but she’d been wrong about where Drobny was staying. As the Scales learned from listening in on the Serbian banker at my wedding reception, he’s been using his yacht as a decoy, as bait, while he jumps from one safe house to the other, from Budva to Belgrade to Bratislava and then back again.
But he seems to have a fondness for Belgrade, and it seems to be mostly because of this club.
It doesn’t take me long to discern why. Within forty-five minutes of our arrival, the mood has shifted from the usual, if infectious, European club vibe to something markedly more carnal. People are kissing openly now, both in the low booths at the far end of the space and on the dance floor itself. Laps are being ridden, people are kneeling in front of spread legs. I see the suited man circulating a few times and picking the most adventurous or lissome partiers to follow him upstairs.
It is no Lyonesse—despite the flashy jewelry and designer clothes and accessories, the level of ambient wealth and influence is nowhere near the same. And the lack of etiquette, of elegance even, is jarring.
But it is affecting. In front of me, Tristan’s cheeks are stained, and his hands keep finding my waist and chafing down my hips.
I finish my drink and set it down on the tall table next to me.
“Let’s dance,” I say, and he doesn’t fight me. Lets me lead him to the floor where the crowd pushes us together, where the music thrums through our bodies.
I never did this in school. There wasn’t time between studying, training, or praying for anything like this. Clubs. Parties. Nights out in short dresses with the thrill of the unknown on me like a second skin.
But strangely, after I became a saint, I frequently found myself in places like this club. Perhaps not the evil priests, but the evil businesspeople and mercenaries and politicians? They loved spots like this, where the sex was as easy to get as the liquor, where they could sit behind a velvet rope and feel—for however short a time—special. Exclusive. Powerful.
Never, though, have I actually found myself on the dance floor. It’s a little giddying to be here with the lights and the music and then Tristan’s hands on my waist. All around us, people are grinding, kissing. Hands are between legs.
Tristan’s hands move to my backside and start kneading. Reflexively. Mindlessly. Like he can’t help himself.
I ache under this short dress, and the cure for it is right in front of me. Kind and earnest and just as turned on. As we dance, I find his stiff organ through his clothes and squeeze. His eyes flutter as he pulls the bottom of my dress up, exposing the lower part of my ass.
It’s so crowded though, so chaotic. We are anonymous, nothing, just two more bodies in a sea of them.
When Tristan’s fingers glide over my pussy, I spread my legs apart to give him access. When he spins me around to grind against me, I grind back, shivering as his fingers find my clit and rub it perfectly. And when the inevitable happens and I feel the blunt head of him pushing at my slit, I welcome it with quivering fervor.
He fucks me like that, from behind, with a hand on my breast and his hips moving in slow, short thrusts.
“Why can’t I stop when it comes to you?” he asks into my ear. “You feel so good, so fucking good, and I just can’t stop?—”
We screw to the music, to the pulsing, heady beat, and it’s urgent and dirty and animal, with people doing the same around us, with shoulders jostling against our own, with barely enough room to make it work.
He fondles my breast as the hand at my front coaxes a quick, sharp orgasm out of me, and then I feel when he follows me over. Swelling pulses between my legs, the drop of his head on my shoulder.
“Fuck,” he whispers in my ear. He sounds completely wrung out. “Fuck.”
I know the feeling.
We put ourselves back together, not bothering to be too discreet given the amount of indecency around us, and then I force myself to think like a professional, to use the opportunity at hand.
“I’m going to use the restroom,” I tell Tristan over the music. I know he’ll try to watch me the whole way there, but the view from the dance floor is terrible, and he’s half-drunk on oxytocin and shame.
I mean, so am I, but at least I know what I plan to do.
I kiss his cheek and then move away before he can protest or try to follow, for once grateful for being so short. It makes it easier to dodge the other guests, to push between them and dart into open spaces, and I know that Tristan’s lost sight of me by the time I’m off the floor.
I double-check, of course, before I move to the staircase, and not finding his face in the crush, I turn to the security guard.
“Mr. Kulov sent for me,” I say in French. If boarding school was good for nothing else, it was good for this. “He says I’m to meet him upstairs.”
The guard gives me a bored look. “No more whores,” he says in heavily accented English.
“But I’m for Mr. Drobny,” I say, with my best Gallic purr.
The name Drobny works—whether he thinks I mean Filip or Filip’s brother doesn’t seem to matter. With a muttered apology, he steps aside and waves me up.
I’ve studied enough pictures of Drobny in the basement of that museum to feel good about identifying him, but I don’t see him as I move through the VIP area. I do see Kulov, however, occupied with someone short-haired and limber in his lap, a bottle of very expensive vodka chilling in a bucket nearby.
I note the booth he’s in, in case that’s where Drobny also likes to sit when he’s here, and then quickly map out the rest of the space, doing my best to look drunk and dazed if someone happens to see me. It works; no one pays me any mind as I work my way to the end of the VIP space and to the door that staff are using to bring out food and booze.
I slip through it, conscious of the time I’ve been away from Tristan, conscious of the fib I’ll have to tell about a long bathroom line. I don’t like lying to him—it’s yet another sin I’ll have to confess. Although after murder and now infidelity, it’s not like lying is going to put me any more in the red.
The staff door leads to an ugly concrete stairwell, which in turn leads to a small kitchen, a tired breakroom filled with employee lockers, and then a fire door, which I know from my external reconnaissance leads to an alley about a quarter mile from the river. It’s a decent escape route, even if its efficacy will depend entirely on my speed. Which will in turn depend on how easy Drobny is to kill.
The fire door is propped open, and I treat myself to a cursory peek through the crack.
“No, it was definitely them,” says a voice.
American English, a woman. Familiar.
Ice slithers through my veins and down my spine. It’s only habit that has me slowing my breathing and guiding my body to regulate itself because I don’t have the presence of mind to do it consciously.
“I don’t care if he’s busy, he should know,” she says. “I was on the balcony above them, and I got the whole thing on video, and I’m sending that shit tonight. Let’s see what he thinks of his precious Isolde then. Let’s see if he wants to ignore Goran’s concerns after seeing her fuck her own bodyguard.”
Goran.
A flash of dark hair and pale skin through the cracked door, and I press myself to the wall, my pulse refusing to slow.
Andrea.
It’s Andrea. From Lyonesse.
Here in Belgrade somehow.
God and the Virgin and all the saints help me.
I go back to the VIP area and then back down the stairs, hoping I look thoroughly debauched as I pass by the bouncer. I find Tristan hovering adorably near the restrooms, waiting for me to emerge.
I take his hand from behind, startling him.
“We need to go,” I say urgently, and pull him out the door.
* * *
I fillhim in on the walk to the penthouse, fabricating only enough to say that I’d gotten turned around on my way to the bathroom and that was how I’d overheard Andrea.
Tristan is ashen, wordless. Both of us, I think, are at a loss for what to do. If Andrea has a video—if she shows that video to Mark?—
And of course what I can’t say to Tristan—or to Mark, if he ever finds out—is that Andrea being at a nightclub in Serbia, a club that just so happens to be the haunt of the man who stabbed her boss, is suspicious. Incriminating, actually.
Someone intentionally inserted the fake identities of the attackers into our system.
Someone who had access to our system, you mean.
Andrea would have been able to do that. Andrea has access to everything, along with Mark and Dinah, and would have known how to cover her tracks. And now she turns up here, at the same place where Drobny is supposed to be?
A new kind of fear pushes its way into my chest. A choking, smothering fear that reminds me of the gaping despair I felt when I was told my mother had died.
The snake is still at Lyonesse. And she might try to kill my husband again.
I have to find a way to tell Mark that doesn’t expose me or my sources of information. But will he even believe me? After he finds out…sees…Tristan and me?
Tristan and I both shower and crawl into bed. We don’t have sex. We barely sleep. We just hang on to each other because it’s what you do when you’re drowning. You grab on to the only thing that can keep you afloat.
When Mark calls in the morning, I suppose I’m ready for it. Or as ready as I’ll ever be.
“Darling wife,” he says when I answer. “I’m coming to visit you in Belgrade.”